DDoS Attack Knocks IRC Servers Offline

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One of the largest IRC communities on the Internet has been under a sustained DDoS attack for two days, resulting in a massive disruption of service and a rash of organizations disconnecting from the service.

The Eris Free Network, which began at the University of California at Berkeley, is the oldest and largest Internet Relay Chat network and has servers in several countries.

The attacks apparently began on Tuesday and are so severe that several of the network’s servers have been taken completely offline.

The attack isn’t the first on an IRC network, but it appears to be one of the largest distributed-denial-of-service attacks to date.

“This is arguably the biggest one we’ve seen so far,” said Ted Julian, chief strategist and co-founder of Arbor Networks Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., provider of anti-DDoS software. “I think a lot of people would say, ‘IRC is down. Who cares? A bunch of techies can’t chat.’ But who’s to say that a smarter attacker couldn’t go after some more business-critical service?”

According to posts on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list, much of the traffic seems to be coming from domains in Korea.

Popular among researchers and academics, IRC is a text-based chat network that is run by an ad hoc group of providers who set up their own servers